Liquid laundry detergents are popular with the consumers. While a variety of surfactants is available to manufacturers to formulate these, it is desirable to include alkoxylated ester surfactants, due to their better bio-degradability in comparison to alcohol-based alkoxylates. In addition, alkoxylated ester surfactants are derived from a renewable source—oil and fat. Unfortunately, alkoxylated ester surfactants hydrolyse in the presence of water, and especially under alkaline conditions. The hydrolysis has a dual disadvantage of destroying the surfactant and introducing fatty acid, one of the degradation products, which is, essentially, oily soil. The hydrolysis of acid esters occurs in an aqueous, high pH environment, and so may occur in the bottled compositions on storage. Thus, compositions containing alkoxylated ester surfactant need to be formulated at pH 6 to 8. Unfortunately, the cleaning performance of the laundry compositions is impaired at such lower pH, especially the removal of grass stains—an extremely important stain, especially on kids clothes or sportswear.
The following art describes compositions, in some instances laundry compositions, that may include various, broadly ranging carboxylic acid esters and/or alkoxylated derivatives thereof, some of which may also contain urea: Mertens (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,071,873 and 6,319,887), Koester et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,384,009), Hees et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,753,606), WO 01/10391, WO 96/23049, WO 94/13618, Miyajima et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,417,146), JP 9078092, JP 9104895, JP 8157897, JP 8209193 and JP 3410880.